Courageous City Dialogues
Co-creating local solutions for urgent global challenges
Cities around the world are trying to find ways to grow and operate sustainably. By sharing knowledge and best practices, we can all learn and transition more quickly. Dutch embassies and consulates worldwide connect with local stakeholders and projects, creating links across borders. The RVO (Netherlands Enterprise Agency) asked us to help these embassies successfully facilitate conversations between stakeholders involved in sustainable and innovative area development through the development of a presentation, workshop and a manual for the embassies to facilitate these workshops themselves. The workshop needs to help cater the following question: How can we bring people together and open doors for new collaborations focused on the future of sustainable cities?
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Aga Biedalak
Esther Baar
Gabriela Chuecos
Bas van Bentum
1 — Deep-dive inspirational practises for city design
In order to help the embassies facilitate stakeholder conversations we used our combined expertise as researchers, designers and urban planners in sustainable solutions and practises towards developing smart cities, to conduct a deep-dive into three case-studies of inspirational area development projects in the Netherlands, researching the best practices.
2 — An integrated approach of developing sustainable cities
We translated the deep-dive insights into a long-list of good solutions and a workshop design for Dutch embassies, using a serious game to share the analysis and create a common understanding of the best practices. By integrating all the layers of the built environment using our Neighbourhood stack, we provided our client a more holistic view of how to create sustainable cities, including rethinking business models, land ownership, governance, and policy design.
3 — Testing our framework for embassies through a collaborative workshop
To validate and immediately put our designed workshop set-up into practice, we facilitated an extended workshop for embassies to bring together people from the Gulf Region and the Netherlands to create a network between governments and businesses. Through collaborative efforts, multiple innovative concepts were developed, providing a platform for practical application and meaningful connections between participants.
A workshop set-up to spark valuable collaborative opportunities
As asked from the RVO, we designed a workshop set-up for Dutch embassies that facilitated conversations with multiple stakeholders. The workshop was not only valuable in terms of its organisational structure, but it also provided a valuable experience for those who attended. One participant even remarked the following: “I am sure many times in the future all of us will recall ideas that were brought up and discussed here”. We are confident that these contacts, partnerships and the concepts developed during the workshop, will continue to flourish and result in future pilot projects, living labs and integral area developments.
